Materials for the History of the Calendars of the Saints’ Feast Days (I)

The subject of our research is four Georgian calendars of the saints’ feast days – the Jerusalem Lectionary, the Calendar of Ioane-Zosime, the Minor Synaxarion of Euthymios the Athonite and the Great Synaxarion of George the Athonite. These literary works represent the major stages of the development of the Georgian liturgical practice: the Jerusalem Lectionary, 7th-century translation of the lost original, reflects the ancient Jerusalemite liturgical practice; Ioane-Zosime’s calendar, which was compiled in the middle of the 10th c., displays the new tendencies of the transition period; the Synaxarion of Euthymios is already specifically focused on the Constantinopolitan liturgical practice; and the Great Synaxarion appears as a crowning of the process of conversion of the Georgian rite to the Constantinople rule.
The aim of our study is to present the process of establishment in the Georgian calendars of saints’ feast days, to identify the saints, which were commemorated on different stages of the development of the Georgian liturgical practice, identify those, who were commemorated in the early period, whose feast days were added later, and which saints disappeared from the calendars of the later times.
In the paper are presented and discussed criteria for distinguishing/identification of the saints – the saint’s name, feast day, group commemorations, anonymous commemorations, secular or religious ranks, geographical locations. Studies have shown that that just one criterion is not enough to identify or distinguish saints, simultaneous consideration of several criteria is needed.
At the end of the article there is a list of saints that we have in all four calendars, that were commemorated in the early stages of Georgian worship and continued after the Byzantinization.